LE Help: Heightmaps

[Duncanlarsen1]

SOLVED - DISREGARD

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Hello, I'm working on an update for my map mods in which I intend to fix the issue of having to set the cell border so close to the landmass by simply downsizing the actual map by half in relation to the rest of the texture. So for example, I would be going from this to this (I also made some artistic changes, but that's irrelevant). I did a similar thing to the worldspace heightmap; reducing it from 2048x2048 pixels to 1024x1024, then increasing the canvas size to 2048x2048 again, filling it in with the proper colors, and generating my meshes used for the terrain displayed in the ingame map screen off of that. It all seemed to work fine in-game at first, however I quickly noticed a problem that I should have anticipated; namely that while I had reduced the size of the x and y axis of the island by half, the actual height data stayed the same, resulting in everything being much taller than it should be. I opened up the generated .btr files in NifSkope to confirm, and sure enough that appears to be what happened.

Before:
http://i.imgur.com/9Md2g2J.png

 

After:
http://i.imgur.com/kLApNC3.png

Can anyone think of a possible solution for this that doesn't involve buying actual heightmap editing software like GeoControl2 (assuming it would even solve my problem)? I like modding, but I'm not sure if I'd be willing to slap down the money just for this issue. I'm not terribly well versed in heightmaps/Landscape generation in general, and especially the bethesda system confuses me.

The only ideas I have are
-Manually editing the new landscape meshes in blender to reduce the z-axis by half. Though I wouldn't even know where to begin with that (haven't messed with blender since I was probably about 14), or if it's even possible to do with this sort of mesh. Can .btr files simply be re-named to .nif and then treated the same way as regular .nif files for the purposes of editing in blender, etc?
-Editing the heightmap to reduce the z-axis by approximately half and then re-generating my meshes. Again, I would have very little idea where to start with this as bethesda heightmaps seem to follow an odd convention that I have difficulty wrapping my mind around.

Would really appreciate some help. Links to relevant information and other ideas are welcome.

Edited June 9, 2016 by Duncanlarsen1

[Duncanlarsen1]

Nevermind, I think I figured out what to do. Turns out NifSkope has a scaling function, who knew :P

[Di0nysys]

That's a crazy amount of terrain lod files you'd have to rescale. Even then, rescaling the btr's would create a lot of graphical oddities in game.
Wouldn't recommend thou btr's can be opened with nifskope and with a few edits made into regular static nifs (just convert the root node into a bsfadenode, then copy the trishapedata into nitrishapes)

[TrickyVein]

Have you re-imported the heightmap image?

 

I'm a little lost based on the description of what you've done

 

You can reduce the range of values in the image which would be the most effective way to change the height values across the worldspace. If you don't have gimp or photoshop, then you can use an import setting in TESAnwynn to apply a scaling factor to the heightmap.

[Duncanlarsen1]

That's a crazy amount of terrain lod files you'd have to rescale. Even then, rescaling the btr's would create a lot of graphical oddities in game.

Not really, I only scaled the very lowest detail level (1/8th I think, which is what is displayed on the map screen) so it's four files for a 2048x2048 heightmap. And since they're scaled with the exact same value (z-axisx0.5) there are no graphical oddities in-game.

 

Anyway, I figured it all out and both of my maps are updated properly now with the fixes I intended. Thanks to both of you regardless though.

Edited June 10, 2016 by Duncanlarsen1